Hardangervidda, a mountain plateau in southern Norway turned into a reindeer graveyard, when it got hit by a lightning storm.
The incident happened on Aug 25 – a lightning reportedly killed a herd of 323 reindeer, including 70 calves and 5 reindeer that had to be put down because they were severely injured in the storm.
“We are not familiar with any previous happening on such a scale,” Kjartan Knutsen, an official at the Nature Inspectorate, part of the Norwegian Environment Agency, said in a phone interview with New York Times.
“Individual animals do from time to time get killed by lightning, and there are incidents where sheep have been killed in groups of 10 or even 20, but we have never seen anything like this,” he said.
Officials said that the interaction between the lightning with the earth and water had electrocuted the animals.
“Reindeer often huddle together in groups during thunderstorms,” Mr. Knutsen said. “It is a strategy they have to survive, but in this case their survival strategy might have cost them their life. The corpses are all lying in one big group, piled together.”
